1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to application services and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for stopping output of a correspondence.
2. Description of the Related Art
Many applications which automatically send responses to users are currently in use. One type of an automatic response that may be generated is a correspondence. A correspondence may be generated by a generic service of an application. For example, a process running in an application may call this generic service to send messages to a user, for example, messages in the form of a confirmation. Correspondence may be sent through many different channels (for example, Short Message Service (“SMS”), e-mail, facsimile, printers, etc.) and may be in a variety of different formats (for example, Portable Document Format (“PDF”), Hypertext Markup Language (“HTML”), text documents, etc.).
Conventional correspondence is generated and automatically output without any human interaction. FIG. 1 is a flow chart illustrating a conventional method of generating and outputting correspondence. A business process triggers a correspondence (Step S101) and the correspondence is customized (Step S102) for the particular business process. For example, in a training management system, a system used by training managers to manage training programs for an entity, the business process could be a cancellation process, booking process, or buying process and depending on the process, different customization may be required. The correspondence is rendered, (Step S103) output (Step S104) and checked for errors in transmission (Step S105). The rendering process may include the merging of business data into a template.
These conventional techniques do not allow users to review or change a correspondence before it is output. For example, in a training management system, users may want to stop the output of a correspondence based on certain parameters, such as, training results, users, date, and/or recipients of the correspondence.
Accordingly, there is a need for a reliable and efficient way to stop output of a correspondence, so that a user can review or change the correspondence before it is output.